Malcolm Garrett was the subject of “Ulterior Motifs: An Exhibition of Graphic Devices 1977-1993,” an exhibition held at SVA in 1993 that featured Garrett’s logotypes for clients in the music, publishing, and retail industries.

A great one from Tony Palladino, a cleaned-up and stripped-down version of the tear-off fliers that used to proliferate to such an extent that they almost became invisible. This Christmas card both grabs your attention and evokes nostalgia.

Really a sister project of Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder’s Underground Gourmet column for New York magazine, Glaser’s “Chinese Grocery” poster sought to guide the uninitiated through a Chinatown market, in this case the no longer extant United Supermarket at 84 Mulberry Street.

Wilfrid Sheed, who died in 2011, was a sharp, flinty prose stylist too often overshadowed by his more explicitly experimental or social-commentary-oriented contemporaries. The acerbic flavor of his art may be best enjoyed in Max Jamison (1970). The next novel, People Will Always Be Kind (named after a line in a Siegfried Sassoon poem) was less heralded but continued to refine his style and adapt it to the world around him (somewhat comparably to Saul Bellow’s middle work). In Dwight Garner’s sensitive appreciation, he emphasizes Sheed’s biting essay style:

“Mushy reviews are a breach of faith,” he declared, and the skin on his compositions was salt-crusted. One review began: “Of Ezra Pound, as of Bobby Fischer, all that can decently be said is that his colleagues admire him.” Another began this way: “Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.” Another stated: “Books about suicide make lousy gifts.”

He wanted to live in a world in which one could find “Gershwin playing all night in penthouses, while George Kaufman fired one-liners into the guests and Harpo scrambled eggs in their hats.” Milton Glaser’s cover, with its punchy color combined with austere but evocative line, seems neatly suited to such a world.

A series of talks at SVA in 1971 and 1972 featured a pretty spectacular line-up: Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The poster art, by John Sposato, reads as minimalism sent through the Push Pinfilter (even though Sposato, who still teaches at SVA today, was, to my knowledge, never employed by the studio), right down to the slowly unfolding plays on depth and perspective.

In light of the goings-on today in the US, here’s a quick snapshot of the poster for the School of Visual Arts’ America Today lecture series, from November 1971 to April 1972. Designed by Bill Naegels and Push Pin Studios, it enlists the studio’s characteristic use of variation within iterations of a larger structure (here, a simple grid).

Speakers included the expected art critics (“Miss” Barbara Rose) and philosophers (William Irwin Thompson), along with neurobiologist George Wald (who was a recipient of the 1967 Nobel prize for his work on the mechanics of vision), director Dusan Makavejev (who showed what would be his most famous film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, in Cannes the previous year), and, finally, on 13 April 1972, one Lieutenant John Kerry: “veteran and anti-war spokesman; full-time political activist.”

An exhibition of Navajo Weaving at the Visual Arts Gallery in 1972 described a loom made of cosmic forces, and blankets rendered in “cannel-coal, turquoise, abalone, and white bead” but developed during a “devastating acculturation process.”

One curious feature about the Glaser collection is its organizational style, which was based on the way the materials were donated by the designer. Subseries G of his Printed Materials contains many of the menus he did for businesses at the World Trade Center.

Another example of paintbrushes (standing in for the artist) combined with another object (here, amid or as the hammers on a typewriter) follows the one we featured last week. The poster this detail is from originally was made to promote a panel discussion between the artists Alice Aycock, Alex Katz, and Lucio Pozzi with critics Lawrence Alloway, Hilton Kramer and moderator Donald Kuspit on the relationship between the artist and critic.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the BBC has just posted a 30-minute radio documentary on the history of Milton Glaser’s iconic I ♥ NY logo. The logo has become so ubiquitous that I think we sometimes forget the fact that it was actually designed by someone. The program traces the genesis of the project back to 1977, when NYC was not the tourist magnet it is today. The New York Chamber of Commerce turned to Glaser to help reverse the state’s economic fortune; Glaser created the logo pro bono. Of course, no one foresaw its enormous cultural impact.

The piece will be available for free for the next six days at the BBC web site.

George Tscherny was one of the heraldic “here comes modernism” designers of the ’60s and ’70s: along with Chermayeff & Geismar, his name seemed to be high on the shortlist when design became a hot item in the boardroom—though the bigwigs did not necessarily always follow through with a whole, or lasting, campaign.

The thing that fascinates me most about Push Pin Graphic is how unpredictable they manage to be all the time. Even apart from the contents of each issue, every promotion contains — no matter how generic the thing as a whole may be — some off-kilter element that has a defamiliarizing effect on the whole endeavor. The Cherie Currie-esque figure here has no other reference anywhere on the page, she’s just hanging out in the margin of the tearaway.

George Tscherny completed a bogglingly wide range of work standardizing the graphics for Pan Am in the early ’70s, redesigning everything from timetables to stewards’ aprons over the course of two years. These city guides are of a piece with the company’s other projects of that era, recalling both the bold imagery of Chermayeff & Geismar’s posters for the company and Tscherny’s own modular environmental graphics.

Though I suspect the overlap between readers of this blog and viewers of the tv show Glee amounts to one person (me), I feel compelled to post the album cover for David Geddes’ Run Joey Run. The cheeseball classic title track was featured in a recent episode of Glee devoted to “rehabilitating” bad songs.

Daddy please don’t, it wasn’t his fault, he means so much to me.
Daddy please don’t, we’re gonna get married, just you wait and see.

Needless to say, that wedding never took place, not after Julie accidentally took a bullet intended for Joey from Daddy’s gun. Classing up the joint considerably are James McMullan’s expressive illustrations for the album’s cover, which covey a sense of desperation and actual emotional stakes.

The most recent addition to the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection is twelve boxes of old and rare art books, ranging from annuals to architecture; Switzerland to Japan. As always, there were plenty of surprises: one was the catalog for an AGI exhibition from 1976, which featured, alongside reproductions of their work, dramatic photos of the designers.

This striking invitation features an image from David Oppenheim’s “Parallel Stress,” in which a figure cups the interior curve of two mounds of earth (in the other, I believe, he hangs in space). The washed-out monochrome palette makes it all blend together, giving the sense of the artist as an organic component of the environment: which aptly reflects this exhibition’s emphasis on the intersection between installation and performance art. Featured in Performance Spaces: a series of printed scores (“songs written for specific birds and athletes”) and the documentation for “Silent Ping Pong” by Bill Beckley, a performance installation by Terry Fox, a confrontational sculpture by Howard Fried, and Dennis Oppenheim’s“Gingerbread Man.”

Poster for the exhibition American-Type Sculpture, Part 2, which opened at the Visual Arts Gallery in 1973. Curator Phyllis Tuchman brought together a prophetic list of artists for the show, including Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra.

In the 1970s, the Mead Library of Ideas held exhibitions showcasing the best contemporary graphic design; they commissioned announcement posters from designers including Tony Palladino, Chermayeff & Geismar, and Seymour Chwast.

In 1971, Chermayeff & Geismar designed these posters for Pan Am, which are now featured in the latest issue of Eye magazine as part of the article Flight of the Imagination. In it, SVA Design Criticism student Frederico Duarte investigates this fruitful period in the company’s history:

Under the supervision of Patrick Friesner, Pan Am’s head of sales and promotion, Chermayeff & Geismar was one of a handful of studios taken on to produce, at a frenzied pace, promotional materials that carried the new identity; others included George Tscherny, Rudolph de Harak and, in London, Alan Fletcher.

Is it a top secret missile defense system? A world-wide clandestine computer network designed to topple rogue governments? The futuristic and vaguely ominous-sounding System 1 was actually an office furniture system from Dictaphone’s furniture division Marble/Imperial.

In 1971, Phyllis La Farge and Seymour Chwast collaborated on the children’s book The Pancake King, which described the rapid ascent of a young master of the griddle pan. It spoke of the joy of breakfast, the perils of fame, the importance of family and of maple syrup. More spreads from The Pancake King are viewable on Flickr (thanks to Norman Hathaway), and show Chwast’s dexterous use of scale and bleed between spreads, and tidily-set Bodoni. The book was included in AIGA’s Fifty Books of the Year.

In 1979, McDonald’s hired Seymour Chwast to contribute one version of the packaging for the introduction of their new product, the Happy Meal. The promotion cost one dollar, and comprised a hamburger or cheeseburger, twelve-ounce soft drink, a small order of french fries, and a McDonaldland Cookie Sampler (not pictured). Along with their comestibles, the first customers could look forward to discovering either a McDoodler stencil, puzzle book, a McWrist wallet, an ID bracelet or McDonaldland character erasers.

In 1970, Milton Glaser did a series of three posters for RCA’s Computer Division entitled Memory Unbound. They express the abstract promise of technology that was at least a decade away for most people.

Ivan Chermayeff designed this poster for AIGA’s “Color” exhibition in 1974, which collected work by artists, photographers and designers. Tightly flowing script creates a pattern made out of textual gibberish, where exaggerated descenders are punctuated at intervals with large blobs of ink. Click through for the whole image, with Chermayeff’s colorful signature.

Detail from Sol Lewitt, All Combinations of Arcs from Four Corners, Arcs from Four Sides, Straight Lines, Not-Straight Lines and Broken Lines (1976).

In March 1976, Sol Lewitt had his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Museum (209 E. 23rd Street). The work exhibited wasn’t the piece itself, but rather the result of instructions he gave to third parties: they assembled a large graphic combination drawn from a vocabulary of white-on-black linear figures provided by the artist. Instead of hiring technicians or specialists to screen the shapes in a particular order, the artist made explicit that the idea or set of instructions for the art was itself the art, rather than the artifact it produced. He continued the process across several similar pieces, some of which used the same graphic forms — one, Wall Drawing #260, was the subject of a recent focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1971, Tony Palladino sent out this note to a selected but wide group of media contacts to solicit work. He printed the note in color and ripped each one by hand. The tactic worked! He successfully got work as a result of the mailing, and doesn’t recall a negative backlash.

Palladino made a point of choosing business associates who would get the joke, and would recognize his initials, T.P. He also says he wouldn’t dare pull a stunt like this today.

SVA Tribeca Gallery Show No. 4, April 3-14, 1979. Works by Gary Sherman and Julie Cohen.

Earlier, we highlighted a look at the SVA Tribeca Gallery, which was open from 1979-1980 in the American Thread Building on West Broadway and featured SVA student work in a professional gallery setting. The complete history of this seminal gallery is now available on our web site (designed by Archives staff member Zachary Sachs). Some featured artworks follow.

Among the ephemera in the Henry Wolf Collection are five early editions of Pentagram’s Feedback — guidebooks for globetrotting designers. Excerpts from David Hockney, Olivier Morgue and Bob Gill follow.

From the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection comes this Norlin Annual Report shaped like an album cover. Inside, along with the actual report, is the record Norlin Salutes The Music in America, which includes works by Morton Gould, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and William Schumann.

The copy for the beloved Maxell “blow-away guy” ad (ca. 1979) was composed by Ed McCabe.

I cannot count how many times I tore through this sparse bachelor pad on packages of XLII tapes. The translation to TV (here, courtesy of YouTube) isn’t quite the same, since however loud-sounding “Ride of the Valkyries” may be, it cannot be as powerful as the imagined decibels conveyed by the print ad, with tie and lampshade frozen permanently in full blow-back amid gusts of high-fidelity.

We’ve just received the first installment of our new George Tscherny Collection, which includes gorgeous modular displays for Pan Am terminals, corporate style manuals, and branded promo items and service uniforms.

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